


Two Movements In Green

by marketchippie



Category: Pan Am
Genre: F/F, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-01
Updated: 2011-01-01
Packaged: 2017-10-27 21:54:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/300454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marketchippie/pseuds/marketchippie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kate and Colette and the dress they buy in Monte Carlo.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Two Movements In Green

**Author's Note:**

  * For [threeguesses](https://archiveofourown.org/users/threeguesses/gifts).



The dress stands in the window, waiting for a body.

  
I.

Colette’s been to Monaco several times: it ceased being astonishing to her more or less after the second trip. She will grant its colors searingly pure—the vivid blue of the sea and sky, the pristine marble-white of the sand—but it reminds her of nothing so much as a queer sort of oasis, familiar on her tongue and untouched by her history. So close to home, and so infinitely far.

Make no mistake, she rather enjoys it. She simply does not come to gamble.

It is the kind of place that finds her playing solitaire in her room, sometimes, with a bottle of the room’s complimentary champagne. Is there sorrow in this? Perhaps, but it feels more sedate than sad. She has never been a good sightseer, has Colette. It has always been reprieve enough that she can fly from country to country and choose, simply, to breathe. She does not need to be a tourist; the peace of citizenry calls to her far more.

So, Monaco it is to be, this week, and after the clamor of weeks past, she finds herself grateful.

The hotel is tauntingly elegant, as is both perk and peril of their job: as she moves inside the foyer, still sandwiched into synchrony with Kate and Maggie and Laura as they walk in, she cannot help but cast her eyes around and catalogue the sleek vastness of it all, the marble parquet and glittering gold chandelier above their heads (gilt, if she had to guess; even so). Laura gasps at her side, and Kate hisses a soft _shush_ over her shoulder. “No, but it’s nice isn’t it?” Maggie grins, and Colette smiles.

“Gosh,” Laura says. “I keep thinking I’ll be used to it.”

Kate murmurs, “I wish you’d pretend.”

Colette shoots her a quick look: _be kind._

After years, she is no longer astonished by plenty. Still: she cannot but keep track of it. Wartime trains your eye to recognize what you lack; survival trains you to watch where the wealth magnetizes. No one, she knows now, understands wealth but those who understand lack.

Sometimes she wonders—

As all who understand lack wonder. She wonders what it is not to catalogue, not to appraise, not to think. To be born to such things.

Islands of plenty like Monaco, all casino whirl and bloodless, pastless passage of time, make her think that she could pretend.

“I’m going out later,” Maggie says.

“Of course you are.” Laura is smiling; Maggie tilts up her chin.

“Who’s coming?”

“Me.”

“I’m in.”

“I haven’t anything to wear,” Colette smiles apologetically, and Maggie’s eyebrows furrow.

“Please! You always—”

“No, I’ll come,” she amends. “I’ve simply got to find something first.”

“Ooh,” Kate glints cheerfully, “shopping, let me know if anything looks good, will you?”

Colette tosses a smile back over her shoulder. “I’m sure they’ll have something irresistible.”

She knows places like this. And perhaps her shopping trip is an excuse to redouble her steps on the parquet, to hear her heels click like so much money and belonging on the hotel’s sleek floor. To pretend.

Nevertheless, they do offer, and offer; the hotel shop is a jewel box of silks. But she knows better. She does not go inside. She only looks, and looks, as if she can glut herself with looking, like she once pretended to feed her stomach with her eyes.

The dress in the window is green, shining.

“Any luck?” Kate asks, materializing at her side.

“I have better sense than this,” Colette replies ruefully, and it’s truer than anything else she’s thought that afternoon. She has far better sense. She is a survivor, not an inheritor.

Still, she would drop jaws in a dress like that.

But she leaves it.

She has tucked up with the week’s _Paris-Match_ and an earful of quiet when Kate comes bursting back into the room. “No,” she says, no preamble. “You know what—you have too much sense. Live a little.”

For a moment, her words make no sense whatsoever (Colette, in spite of herself, thinks about Dean, thinks about Dean where she has sworn not to think about him, about honey hair and honey smiles and eyes full of sky and sun); she blinks, then, and puts down the magazine. “Is this about the dress? That’s awfully dramatic.”

“Maybe.” Kate shakes her head, shuts the door, sits down on the bed. “Okay, it’s about the dress. Want to go halfway on it with me?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I need a dress. I mean, I brought dresses, but I need a _dress_. For tonight. You know what I mean?”

Colette raises her eyebrows. “Of course. A date?”

“More than that.” Kate exhales hard and then laughs. “But that. Seriously, and it’s just right, it’s gorgeous—”

“I know. I wish—”

“No, I know. Can’t afford it. I can’t either. But we could.”

Kate raises her eyebrows, smiling with that impossible warmth that seems to run in her family, small and hopeful, and Colette drops back against her chair. Kate has a knack, she thinks, like Bridget had sometimes, of making the world the backdrop to some impossible larger drama; unlike Bridget, though, Kate seems to revel in it, to find joy in it even as it exhausts her, to drive into it with a full heart. And Kate is warm and constant and shadowless; Kate is looking at her, far more plaintive than she is mercenary, with tremendous, tremulous hope, and Colette can’t help but laugh.

“All right. It’s only one dress.”

“We can trade off keeping it in our closets,” Kate says, quite solemn, nodding as she speaks, and then the solemnity breaks, there is earnest relief on her face, and she jumps off the bed and knocks into Colette with a hug, wrapping arms around her neck and hair around her face. Colette splutters into her ear, laughing.

“What on earth—”

“Thank you,” Kate says against her hair, “seriously, thank you, _thank_ you,” and there’s nothing like this to feel quite grounded again, to feel quite practical by compare, to feel warm in spite of herself even as she can only, baffledly, laugh and blow out a mouthful of ginger curls.

A far better melodrama than her own. She shall take this one and keep it.

Kate links elbows with her as they walk down the hall, heels sinking into the plushness of the carpet outside the room. They walk silently and outside the hotel windows the sun slips low and gold in the sky; they are on the precipice of the evening.

“You’re coming out, right?”

“Don’t be silly. Of course I am.”

“I mean—” Kate bites her lip. “I’m not, but—”

“Of course.” Colette laughs. “Your date.”

She nods, teeth digging in further into a smile, and her fingers grip tight into Colette’s arm with an anxiety Colette does not fully understand, but she does not feel she has to. She strokes Kate’s fingers with her own and relishes the simplicity, the _reason_ , the grounding in the moment.

When they get to the shop, and the dress is taken down off the mannequin, it is no longer the dress that shines. It is Kate, when she tries it on, who glows beacon-bright, all red hair and emerald silk, burnished and transfigured. At least for a moment, before she starts fidgeting with the seams, the back, the zipper up her side and the collar limning her collarbones, staring into the fitting room mirror. “Does it look okay?”

“It looks fine.”

“Just fine?” she asks, eyebrows arching into worried parentheticals, and Colette breathes out an amused sigh.

“Now you’re just being silly.”

“Right.” Turning on her heels back toward the mirror, she smooths the satin over her hips, as if scrying for wrinkles already. Even now Colette can tell how it will fit on her: every one of them has borrowed jackets, skirts, spare blouses from the others in a pinch, and they understand the fit of each other’s bodies from the opposite side. Kate is fuller, curvier, and the dress will not adhere to Colette like this. Space to breathe, she thinks, no worry, thinks in advance of the girdle beneath she shall have to wear to fill it in. Doesn’t think about the way it will look by itself, that girdle, or if she does, she’s not thinking about anyone in particular looking at her. It wouldn’t matter, she insists to herself, who it was. Not a pilot with sun in his hair, not a sister with fire in hers. She hasn’t got plans.

It’s Kate who has plans, and Kate who has the dress tonight.

“Good luck, ma chou,” she says, kissing Kate on the cheek, and Kate flushes under her mouth. “With whatever, whomever.”

She will think of Kate when she is zipping up her own black dress, shall flash on thoughts of green satin when she is sipping champagne in the billiards room and kissing a Belgian at the bar. Somewhere that night in Monaco, a story is being told.

  
II.

On the slick white steps to the hotel, Kate shivers. The night is warm and still, but all the same, waiting alone, she feels bare.

Blame it on the dress, she think, which slices low on the bust even under the structured line of the collar that lies across her clavicles. Under her cape, she slides her hands up her arms and holds herself together.

She was never the sister who knew how to wear clothes. That was Laura’s purview, Laura who’d grown up to look like the American Dream, casting Kate as the American who looked back and dreamed. But this was different than filling a sweater. This wasn’t a dream, she thought, smoothing her hands down her hips. A movie, maybe—where state secrets were as American as Apple pie.

The mark (it’ll take her well into the evening to think of him as _Niko_ ) walks down the stairs (it is far easier to think of him as a mark, she will be angry, almost, to think of him as a man).

“Well,” he says, laughing, face wide open and genuinely delighted. “Look at you.”

When she moves in against him, slipping her hand into the crook of his elbow and her body into the space at his side, she has stopped shivering. The night is warm, waiting.

.

She gets back late, well into the morning, and Colette turns over in her bed. She raises an eyebrow, cheek creased against the pillow, doesn’t need to ask: Kate nods, and she can’t help grinning as she does, a wide, bright, easy smile; it doesn’t matter the way her heart was in her throat all evening or the way Niko’s hands sang against her skin. ( _Niko_ , now, and she is past frowning at it: this worries her, but the worry touches her from at a great distance.) The performance stops mattering, the pretense dissipates. She’s won, and she’s back, and she’s grinning.

“How was your night?” she asks, unpinning the clasp of her cape, and Colette rolls over onto her back.

“Not so eventful. I lost track of the girls, I’m afraid.” Colette gives her a small smile that seems to turn down at the edges. “Your sister—”

Kate rolls her eyes. “Maggie keeps an eye out.”

“Yes. And I got waylaid at the bar.”

“Oh, waylaid?”

Colette smiles, eyebrows in mischievous, lazy arches, and Kate’s fingers stutter over the hook and eye of her dress.

“Damn,” she says quietly. “I—help me out here?”

Pushing herself up from the bed, Colette settles herself in against Kate’s back and begins to unlatch the clasps. “Thank you,” she says, slowly and so quietly that Kate wonders if she would have been able to hear her were she not speaking into Kate’s skin, Kate’s hair. The only sound in the night is the rumple of fabric and the combined rise and fall of their breath: Kate laughs, suddenly, and breaks it.

“What for?”

“Pulling me along with you.” Colette runs a finger over the silk. “It was abominably impractical, of course, but—worth it, I’d say.”

A shiver slips up Kate’s spine. _We both helped make me what I was, tonight._ State secrets written in silk: she wonders if that makes Colette culpable. “And you haven’t even got a chance to wear it yet.” Not Colette’s country to betray, she thinks; not Colette’s mission. On Colette, it could simply be a perfect piece of clothing. “Try it on,” she says, standing and rolling it down over her hips, over the bones of her girdle. and the clasp of her garters, careful that it doesn’t catch. Colette demurs sleepily, and she turns. “Here. C’mon.”

“I have yet to acquire an occasion for it,” Colette says drily, but even so, she takes it, sliding her way off the edge of the bed and standing. Her back turns, she begins to unbutton her pajama top: easy, unselfconscious, they cannot but be pragmatic about slipping in and out of clothes with each other. And Kate had vowed very early on to never be naïve about such things, to never be weird about it, she wasn’t _Laura_ , honestly.

Shreds of moonlight illuminate Colette’s skin, Colette’s bare shoulders and ungirdled waist, as she peels out of her pajamas and slips the dress over her head. “Do you need a hand?” Kate asks, and Colette waves a hand absently over her shoulder, still slow with sleep but competent all the same.

She touches the fabric, Kate notices, almost reverently, as though her fingers are drinking it in.

When she turns back around, she is shining in the half-lit room, all green satin and narrow limbs beneath, smiling crookedly and canting a hand against her hip. “Well,” she says, and Kate claps a hand over her mouth.

“No,” she says, scrying for words. They don’t appear—not real ones. She shakes her head. “But Dean’s going to die when he sees that.”

“Dean?” Colette asks, her eyes as bright as the fabric, biting a laugh into her lip. “Who said anything about him?”

“Please,” Kate says, and Colette narrows her eyes, face scrunched with mock, frank amusement. Not denying—they both know better, and there is a league of affection in her laugh, of joy. She says nothing else, though. Doesn't need to. It would be pretense to try.

And she sits at Kate’s side, wordless and clear-eyed, mouth a sly slanted line, and she presses a kiss into Kate’s cheek.

Kate flushes under her mouth, in spite of herself, slipping an arm around her waist. Silk scrunches under her hands, and for a moment she cannot help flashing on the men who will get to do this in the future without thinking: Dean, Niko, anyone lucky enough to fall into their future.

But their faces fade into the dark.

They didn’t buy the dress for any of the men, and none of them are here, now, in the quiet, companionable dark of the Monte Carlo hotel.

The luck’s in their hands. Theirs alone.

  
—

The dress hangs in the closet, worn into the shape of the both of them.


End file.
